Director leaving Juvenile Justice Department

July 14, 2010

The director of the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice has resigned as the department wrestles with Gov. Pat Quinn's controversial proposal to fold it into the larger Department of Children and Family Services.

By nearly every account, Kurt Friedenauer has improved his department since it was broken off four years ago this month from the much larger Department of Corrections, though his tenure has been marked by a lack of funding and little support from the state legislature, especially when Gov. Rod Blagojevich was in office.

Friedenauer said in an interview Wednesday that the proposed merger with DCFS "was not and is not the basis" for his resignation, which is effective at the end of the month. He wants to pursue other career opportunities, he said.

But Friedenauer made clear the task ahead is complex and fraught with risks that youths in the custody of Juvenile Justice will get lost in the larger bureaucracy of DCFS. He said, too, there is a danger that the momentum the Juvenile Justice Department has achieved will be lost to the merger process.

"I've seen juvenile justice services administered in just about every configuration," Friedenauer said in the interview. "Some have been successful. Some have failed. ... I've reached the conclusion that it's not so much what the title or the shingle on the front door says, it's really a matter of how services are organized within a respective entity."

Friedenauer, who ran the department for two years while it was part of Corrections and who was named the director after the split, has moved to change Juvenile Justice's punishment-focused culture to one more focused on rehabilitation.

But the legislature expected that creating the new department would be revenue-neutral, meaning Juvenile Justice would not cost the state more than it did when it was part of Corrections. The result was that the department was still closely aligned with Corrections; it shared some back-office operations, had a small executive staff and worked on the same tight budget as before.

Quinn's proposal to merge Juvenile Justice with DCFS means it will again be part of a much larger agency, though one with a different orientation than Corrections. DCFS has some 15,500 children in its care, while Juvenile Justice has 1,200 youths in custody and another 1,800 on parole and in other aftercare programs.